PRG at prolight+sound 2015 in Frankfurt

21/04/2015Exhibitions

The annual prolight+sound trade show has become the foremost exhibition for the live event technology industry and runs alongside the musical instrument fair Musikmesse, the two attractions welcomed over 130,000 visitors through their doors over four show days. The Production Resource Group (PRG) continued their intimate association with the event by supplying lighting, rigging and audio to the Live Entertainment Awards presentation, as well as being their headline sponsor. The LEAs take place every spring on the eve of prolight+sound in the Festhalle arena to pay tribute to the organisers of live events. Our installation utilised stock from throughout the PRG pool and demonstrated our ability to coordinate large groups of people working in different countries to create a production of the highest calibre.

The rig was designed by renowned German designer Jerry Appelt, whose previous credits include the Eurovision song contest, the Delhi commonwealth games opening and closing ceremony and the German X Factor TV show. For this project he crafted a design which showcased a selection of products exclusive to PRG and featured 107 Best Boy washes, 12 Best Boy HPs, 36 Bad Boys and 48 Icon beams. We worked closely with fixture manufacturer SGM who provided 112 G Spots, 152 six packs as well as a host of Q7, P5, P2, Q2 and Q7-W fixtures. Across the stage, entrance and product demonstration area there were 774 lighting fixtures, hung from almost 400M of truss.

Video projection was central to the theme and designed to inject the wow factor into an already adventurous demonstration of our capabilities. The centrepiece of which were five projection mapped geometric screens that tracked around the stage during the 9 minute demonstration. Each screen was projected onto by an individual Barco HDQ40 projector, the media server received tracking information from the rigging control to give the exact positioning of each hoist, and was able to calculate the dimensions of the picture which needed to be projected on each screen. In addition to this elaborate feature there were various side screens and a chandelier made up of 480 SGM LB-100 LED balls. All the video content was driven by a D3 media server and a PRG M Box pro media server.

PRG project manager Tom Kaczmarek oversaw the project and assigned a team of experts to make everything happen. The planning stage of the event took an estimated 1600 hours, before 21 trailer-loads of equipment was unloaded at the Festhalle and the rig was assembled in a mere 36 hours. Production Resource Group were thrilled to have welcome approximately 25,000 clients and industry colleagues into our show space and thank everybody for their support. We look forward to returning to Frankfurt in 2016 with an even more ambitious way of showing the rest of the industry what we can do.